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Nuclear schizophrenic symptoms as a window on the relationship between thought and speech

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 January 2018

Tim J. Crow
Tim J. Crow*
Affiliation:
Prince of Wales International Centre, University Department of Psychiatry, Warneford Hospital, Oxford OX3 7JX. E-mail: tim.crow@psychiatry.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract

Background

Symptoms of schizophrenia known as nuclear’ or ‘first-rank’ are found in all populations. The genetic variation that gives rise to them must be as old as modern Homo sapiens.

Method

The hypothesis was formulated that language evolved, under constraints on callosal transmission, by a process of hemispheric specialisation. One component, the phonological output sequence, became localised to the dominant hemisphere whereas its associations (the signifieds) were lateralised in part to the non-dominant hemisphere. Concepts (‘thoughts’) are translated through a bi-hemispheric interaction into phonemes (‘speech’) by the speaker in frontal association areas, and decoded back into concepts (‘meanings’) by the hearer in occipito-temporo-parietal association areas.

Results

The first-rank symptoms demonstrate that an integral component is a system of ‘indexicality’ that distinguishes those phonemic signals generated by the hearer, from his own thoughts, and from signals that he receives from an interlocutor.

Conclusions

Language, as Buehler proposed, is cast in a coordinate system orientated at its origin, in the dominant hemisphere, to the self of the speaker. Thus conceived, the phenomena of the illness called schizophrenia are key to the neural organisation of the human characteristic of language.

Type
Papers
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 173 , Issue 4 , October 1998 , pp. 303 - 309
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 The Royal College of Psychiatrists 

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